Consumer digital imaging has vastly increased the ability for users to amass and share very large numbers of still images, video image sequences, and multimedia records combining one or more images and other content. Still images, audio recordings, video sequences, and multimedia records are referred to collectively herein with the term “media assets,” and the term “image” refers both to an individual image, and to videos, which are simply a collection of images with accompanying audio. With very large numbers of media assets, organization can become difficult.
Videos and images are easy to share via the internet through email or social media. It is common for a person (user) to have several hundred contacts on a social networking system, having on average several hundred or thousand images and videos. Therefore, a user can have access to hundreds of thousands or millions of images and videos in his or her social networking system, and hundreds or thousands of images or videos can be added to the user's social networking system in a single day. People generally only look at a small fraction of the images or videos that their contacts in the social networking system publish.
While the ease of sharing media assets facilitates communication between people, the volume of media makes it challenging to organize or summarize a particular contact's collection, or to summarize the aggregate activity across sub-groups of contacts.
Efforts have been made to organize images and videos according to the locations in which the images were captured.
Today, many image capture devices have built-in GPS receivers for tagging the approximate locations where an image or video is captured. Unfortunately, this information is often inaccurate or non-existent, especially in “urban canyons.” Even when it is present, it can be stripped from the image header in later processing. Further, the content of the image can still be unknown, even though the image is captured at a particular location. For example, an image captured near the Empire State Building may be captured at ground level looking up at the Empire State Building, or the image might be an image of Manhattan, captured from the top of the Empire State Building.
Commercially, several websites and software applications maintain lists of the travels of a particular user. For example, TripAdvisor users indicate cities that they have visited by selecting cities from a list, or entering the names of cities. A personalized map having pushpins at the locations of visited cities can then be viewed, and the cities visited by others in the user's social networking system can also be viewed. Unfortunately, this system relies on manual entry of the cities visited, and therefore many busy users do not enter this information.
Furthermore, these aforementioned methods fail to address issues regarding geo-location of consumer photographs in a social networking environment, where individual users have access to many thousands of images and videos posted by contacts (i.e., friends) on their social network.